Community-Engaged Learning

Faculty Funding

Community-Engaged Learning Mini-Grant

Mini-grant proposals are accepted on a rolling basis and will be reviewed up until the deadlines for each semester listed below:

Fall 2019 final deadline: August 1, 2019

Spring 2020 final deadline: December 1, 2019

Launched in 2014, the Community-Engaged Learning Grant provides funds to faculty and staff whose projects or courses combine academic learning and community engagement opportunities for undergraduate students in Arts, Sciences and Engineering. The purpose of these grants is to:

Support valuable community-university partnerships

Address community-identified needs

Enhance student learning

Successful projects achieve this by integrating community-based experiential opportunities in the Rochester area with traditional classroom learning.

Grant funds can be used to support expenses associated with the course or project (e.g., transportation, course supplies, curriculum development, expenses incurred by partner organizations, etc.). Faculty and instructional staff may submit one proposal per course or project. Each proposal has a maximum award of $5,000 per course.

Course Development Grants

The Community-Engaged Learning Course Development Grant funds $10,000 to faculty who plan on developing a new course that combines academic learning and community-engagement opportunities for undergraduate students in Arts, Sciences and Engineering. The purpose of these grants is to:

Support valuable community-university partnerships

Address community-identified needs

Enhance student learning

We are highly selective of and prioritize applications in which community partners beyond campus are genuine partners -- meaning that they play a role in setting learning objectives, and designing and implementing learning activities, and the project addresses unmet needs as defined by the partner.

Funding Decisions

We make funding decisions based on the following criteria:

Community Engagement: We prioritize projects where community organizations/persons play a role in the design and implementation of the learning activities as well as projects addressing an unmet need as defined by the partner.

Community-Engaged Learning: We aim to support activities that are well-integrated with the course’s learning objectives. To assess this, we look at the cogency of the proposal’s explanation of how the activity will contribute to the course’s learning objectives. We also consider the learning activities and assignments the instructor will use to help students reflect on and articulate the connections between community engagement and the course material.

Disciplinary Breadth: Priority will be given to faculty and courses that have not previously received support with the goal of encouraging community-engaged learning throughout the College. However, it is still possible for projects to be funded more than once.

Sources of Support: We prefer to fund projects that will combine support from our program with support from other sources, such as department funds, and other grant opportunities (both internal and external). Proposals that can suggest longer-term strategies to ensure the sustainability of the project are preferred.

Assessment and Development: We hope to support the instructor’s efforts to learn from student experiences and use what they learn to deepen the significance of student-learning experiences in future courses. Therefore, we favor proposals that include plans for assessing the supported activities and applying the results of that assessment in the design of future courses.